What should finance reconcile before ERP go-live?

The first payment and dispatch

Before switching to a new ERP, ask a collections clerk to find an unpaid invoice and apply a test receipt to it. Give a warehouse supervisor a partly shipped order and ask what still needs to go on the truck. Matching closing and opening trial balances tells finance that the account totals carried across. These two checks tell the people opening for business whether they can use the records behind it.

One invoice, two wrong statements

In this illustrative rehearsal, a fictional UAE distributor moves its open invoices to a new ERP. Every invoice arrives. One, for AED 12,000, belongs to customer 17 and lands on customer 71.

The migration team can tick off both the invoice count and the AED 120,000 total. Yet when customer 17 pays, the clerk cannot find the invoice on that account. Customer 71 could get a reminder for a debt it never incurred.

Collections can find this error before launch by comparing the two lists of open invoices. Match each document on legal entity, customer ID and original reference. Check its currency, outstanding amount and due date. Keep a cross-reference if the new ERP assigns different IDs. Investigate duplicate keys, mismatched fields and documents that appear on only one list. The same comparison works for supplier bills.

Agree when the old books close

For every company moving across, record the cutoff time and time zone. Finance saves the closing trial balance and reports showing which customer and supplier items are still open. The warehouse lead saves stock by item and location. Keep the filters and posting period with each extract so another person can reproduce it.

A group operating in the UAE and Saudi Arabia should reconcile each legal entity's books before looking at a consolidated report. The group total can still look right when an invoice lands in the wrong company. Where a transaction uses a different currency from the company's books, retain both amounts and the conversion basis the controller used.

Suppose a driver returns stock after the warehouse extract. Who records it? Agree who owns transactions around the cutoff, where staff enter them, and how to identify each by its original reference. After the final load, trace the return to the opening stock calculation or to a later movement. It should increase the new system’s stock just once.

A worksheet for finance and operations

For each check, keep the source and destination report references, the difference, its cause, the reviewer and the time they checked it. The roles below are illustrative. Before rehearsal, the controller should agree which differences require a hold and who can accept an exception.

Ask which import posts to the general-ledger accounts that summarize customer and supplier balances. Oracle flags a specific risk in NetSuite migrations. Importing open invoices or bills can post amounts that a later opening-balance import counts again. Run the detailed lists against those ledger accounts after both imports have posted.

• Oracle's NetSuite migration guidance

Rehearse a payment and a dispatch

Run the whole rehearsal against the time available to switch. Include time to investigate a discrepancy, correct the load and produce fresh reports for the controller. Microsoft recommends repeated migration tests and business sign-off in its Dynamics 365 go-live checklist.

• Microsoft's go-live checklist

Back at the fictional distributor, trace the AED 12,000 invoice to the incorrect customer identifier on the import record. Find every document affected by the same error. Correct the source mapping, return the rehearsal environment to its agreed starting point and repeat the affected load. Compare both customer statements again. An adjustment to the ledger total would leave the original problem intact.

Now let the clerk sign in with the permissions they will have on launch day. Have them apply the test receipt using the original invoice reference, export the customer statement and trace the payment to its ledger entry. In the warehouse test environment, ship the remainder of the partly fulfilled order and look at the quantity still open. Save the before-and-after references with the worksheet.

Teams evaluating BRICKnSIGHT can ask for this rehearsal in a demo. Its setup guide lists Excel imports for opening balances, open invoices and opening stock, with a dry run and an undo option. Ask which reports you get after a dry run and what you can undo after subsequent transactions have posted.

• BRICKnSIGHT setup guide

Who can hold the switch?

Name the decision owner before the rehearsal. Escalate an unexplained control-account difference, an invoice booked to the wrong legal entity or an order that would ship twice. A controller might accept a documented rounding difference within an agreed tolerance. The currency, cause and business impact determine whether that makes sense. Record who accepts it and when the team will clear it.

At the decision meeting, put the unresolved items beside the signed worksheet. Record who authorised the switch or the hold, which cutoff they used and what evidence they saw. If they hold, tell frontline and support staff where to record new orders and payments until the next attempt. Give someone responsibility for carrying those entries forward.

On the first live day, the collections clerk can trace a real receipt to the opening invoice and the warehouse supervisor can check the first dispatch against the quantity due. Keep the old reports and the launch mapping accessible to the people handling queries. When a customer calls about an opening balance a week later, they will need to find the original invoice.

Related Bridges work

• Digital Transformation
• Data Engineering, Analytics & Monetization
• BRICKnSIGHT ERP